Forrest Wickman, "This Is a Blog Post. It Is Not a 'Blog.'" Slate 5/24/2013:
Let’s get this straight up front: I am now writing a blog post, not blogging a blog.
For many, using the word blog when you mean blog post is an understandable mistake. Most who make it are new to blogging, or aren’t fluent in the language of the Web. But over the last several months it’s become clear to me that the tendency to make this error has infected even some of the most Internet-savvy denizens of the Web. And it needs to stop.
I hit my breaking point a few weeks back with—who else?—Amanda Palmer. Of all the irritating things in her blog post about “A Poem for Dzhokhar,” the most irritating was the title: “A Blog About ‘A Poem for Dzhokhar.’ ” Palmer, of course, had not created a whole blog about her poem “A Poem for Dzhokhar.” (Even she’s not self-involved enough to do that.) Instead, she’d written a 2,000-word blog post about the poem.
Wickman goes on at length about this fault, giving a series of other examples, and then explaining why it's wrong:
The reasons for avoiding this linguistic boner are pretty simple. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that it can be confusing. No matter what dictionary you check—online, Urban, or otherwise—you will find no definition of blog that means blog post. Saying one to mean the other is like saying magazine when you mean article. The listener or reader may get your drift eventually, but only after they’ve been thrown for a loop.
Second, it can undercut anything serious you have to say. The word blog is, even after all these years, a little funny-sounding, and this is magnified many fold when you use it incorrectly. You don’t want to undermine your own writing by calling your brilliant post a “blog.” […]
The No. 1 reason to make this change—and I’m not going to sugarcoat this—is that calling a post a blog makes you sound stupid. That may seem harsh, but I’m doing you a favor. Every time you make this mistake, it sounds like you don’t understand this newfangled thing, the World Wide Web. Even if you think all those who might judge you are just being superficial, that’s not going to stop them from judging you.
Now, as it happens, I agree with him on the point of usage. As far as I'm concerned, a blog is (as the Wiktionary explains)
A website that allows users to reflect, share opinions, and discuss various topics in the form of online journal while readers may comment on posts. Most blogs are written in a slightly informal tone (personal journals, news, businesses, etc.) Entries typically appear in reverse chronological order.
Of course, the Wiktionary gives another sense for blog – which I don't use:
An entry in a blog.
The interesting thing here is that barely a dozen years after the word blog was coined (this happened on May 23, 1999, according to the OED), Forrest Wickman has developed strong prescriptive instincts about how it should and shouldn't be used — and so have I, though I know better than to make the usual pointless arguments about confusion and dictionaries.
But the worst thing is people who call comments "posts" :-).
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